Four Emerging Data Center Archetypes
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Disruptive Forces Breed Change
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Data Center Archetypes
From transportation to healthcare to retail, disruptive forces are bringing challenges and opportunities to virtually every industry.
The data center, an enabler of disruption in many instances, is no exception. This disruption is coming from external forces and
internal pressures that are challenging existing operating paradigms and have the potential to create new data center archetypes.
The dominant enterprise archetype today is the high-availability data center, with 2N power and redundant generators and
cooling. Most enterprises have added some form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to their IT architecture, and a growing number
are moving to or investigating a bimodal architecture that recognizes that different applications, data types and groups of users
have different requirements in terms of speed of deployment, productivity, efficiency, resiliency and security. In addition, open
computing and the software-defined data center have the potential to change the way IT systems are configured and supported.
The move to bimodal is not the only example of an emerging archetype. Here are four additional data center archetypes our
customers are investigating.
Cloud of Many Drops
The reality of cloud computing today is that many enterprises
enterprise server utilization, extended life for existing data
are buying computing, primarily through SaaS deployments,
centers that move toward a self-support model, and the
to bring applications online faster and cheaper, at a time when
ability for enterprises to build new data centers based on
in-house computing resources are underutilized. Virtualization
average rather than peak demand.
was supposed to address low server utilization rates,
and has had some affect; however, a 2015 study by Stanford’s
Jonathan Koomey and Anthesis Group’s Jon Taylor, found
that enterprise data center servers still only deliver, on average,
between 5 and 15 percent of their maximum computing output
over the course of a year. In addition, the study found that 30
percent of physical servers are “comatose,” meaning they have
not delivered computing services in six months or more.
At a time when the “shared-service” model is being applied
to everything from personal taxi service to legal counsel, it
shouldn’t be long before a technology platform is available that
enables enterprises to not only tap into this unused capacity
on-demand, but also sell their excess capacity on the open
market. This shared services approach could result in increased
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Data Center Archetypes
The Data Fortress
The cost and frequency of data breaches continues to rise, despite
the billions spent annually on digital security. The Ponemon
Institute Cost of Data Breach study shows a 23 percent increase
in the cost of a privacy-related data security breach in the last two
years, with total cost now at $3.8 million. In addition, a Ponemon
study of data center downtime commissioned by Emerson
Network Power found that the number of security-related
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downtime incidents rose from 2 percent in 2010 to 22 percent in
2015. The cost and frequency are rising to the point where some
organizations have no choice but to take a security-first approach
to data center design.
The Corporate Social Responsibility Compliant Data Center
The industry has been dealing with the challenge of efficiency
since at least 2007, but the focus has largely been financial.
Now, with industry energy consumption continuing to rise and
gaining increased attention, some organizations are looking
at how data centers fit into their corporate sustainability
plans. This focus on sustainability is elevating the profile of
issues such as carbon footprint, alternative energy use and
responsible disposal. To be meaningful, this approach must
include the full data center ecosystem, including colocations
and cloud service providers.
This is already happening to some degree as organizations in
medical, Industrial, pharmaceutical, financial and aerospace
industries are deploying data pods within or adjacent to existing
data centers specifically for sensitive data. The next wave is
the purpose-built, cold-storage facility with massive storage
arrays protected by heavy investments in security systems and
protected from access by all but authorized networks. Colocation
facilities are now offering “secure suites” with dedicated
power and thermal equipment, instead of the open-caged
environments that have been standard, to improve physical
security in their facilities.
These organizations will take a more aggressive approach to
data center efficiency—adopting, for example, cooling with
maximum economization and UPS systems that apply active
inverter eco mode that move seamlessly to high-efficiency
mode—while also pushing for increased use of alternative
energy, such as wind and solar, to power data center operations
and achieve carbon neutrality. In light of this trend, the
prediction made by Data Center 2025 participants that solar
energy would account for 21 percent of data center power by
2025, which seemed extremely aggressive to some experts,
may prove accurate.
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Fog Computing
Fog computing is a distributed computing architecture being
promoted by Cisco in response to the Internet of Things.
Similar in philosophy to the micro data centers now being
deployed at the network edge to provide faster access to
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content and applications, fog computing connects multiple
small networks of industrial systems into one large network
across an enterprise. In the fog, application services are
distributed across smart devices and micro data centers to
improve efficiency and concentrate data processing so that
only actionable data is transmitted. This provides a more
efficient and effective method of dealing with the immense
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amount of data being generated by the sensors that comprise
the Internet of Things. It also allows data to be aggregated and
filtered locally to preserve bandwidth for actionable data.
Speed, cost, security, sustainability, application availability and productivity must all be factored into future
data center archetypes as data center operators deal with disruption from inside and outside their organization.
Some segments of the market are being driven primarily by one disruptive force, such as security or sustainability,
to create these emerging archetypes. Most data center operators, however, will have to juggle the conflicting
needs of multiple application owners or attempt to satisfy application owners who demand “all of the above.”
Software-defined management will increasingly provide the flexibility organizations need to move away from
single-instance data centers in which all data and applications are treated with the same level of resiliency and security while
adopting new technologies and practices being pioneered in the archetypal data centers. This will enable organizations to
evolve to the data center ecosystem of the future capable of accommodating all of these disruptive trends through a multimodal model in which the environment is tailored to specific needs of the data, applications and users it supports. By working
with application owners to meet their specific needs, data center operators will have the opportunity to build on their role as
service providers to become trusted advisors.
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